The disclosure relates to provisioning computing resources. More particularly, the methods and systems described herein relate to functionality for dynamically provisioning resources for on-demand courses.
Every year small, medium, and large enterprise systems and application software companies release new software. A new software release typically requires customer explanation and training. Training for major software releases conventionally takes the form of classroom instruction including “hands-on” training labs.
“Hands-on” training lab instruction is often made available in classrooms or at events such as trade shows, sales meetings, partner sales meetings, user group meetings, and technical conferences. Training labs are usually created by vendors or by their training affiliates. Annually, hundreds of thousands of “hands-on” training labs are delivered.
For the technical community of vendors, partners, and users, hands-on training lab instruction is often an extremely valuable and effective form of instruction. However, staging hands-on training labs is often an expensive proposition including significant acquisition costs for systems, software, and maintenance. Logistics for students and for the provisioning and configuration of systems are often both complex and time consuming. With a lack of common tools, content creation and the distribution of that content can also be difficult to coordinate. Often technical employees or volunteers provide the content and infrastructure for training labs, but once the training lab has been given, the physical infrastructure is removed and electronic versions of the training labs are typically destroyed.